The Wave Assignment #2

Last blog I started off this attempt at a new happiness Wave by asking readers to begin to notice the internal landscape of your feelings. For those of you who are really doing this, I’m not expecting our collective happiness index to have improved yet. We have to get through a few more steps before the impact of this exercise can be felt. But, are you seeing a pattern in which emotions you feel most often? Are you less joyful than you thought you were, or maybe more joyful than you realized? How about anger? Angry more or less often than you thought?

The first exercise was to see if you are able to observe yourself. Can you use your awareness to notice how you are feeling? We are generally busy observing others. This is sort of a structural problem. Our eyes are in OUR head so we are always looking out. These exercises are a shift in focus to what we cannot easily see, ourselves. So we are trying to increase that limited perspective

The second exercise is to reflect on the sequence of events that led to the emotions we observed in ourselves. Here’s the sequence: an event occurs, we interpret it, then we have a feeling about it then we do things based on those feelings.

Let’s focus on anger and sadness since those seem to create the most problems for everyone. These two emotions are close cousins; anger often morphs into sadness and sadness into anger. Sadness is a more passive, inward place and anger a more outward, aggressive place. But they are close companions. For example, crying and saying “You hurt my feelings,” followed by “I hate you!!!”

So here’s Assignment #2: When you notice you are angry or sad, stop and rewind. First, exactly what happened? Don’t put your opinion here. Remember, we were all taught the difference in elementary school between facts and opinions? Well we’re still learning that. So, just describe factually what happened. Don’t say “A jerk tried to run me off the road.” That’s full of interpretation. What actually happened is that you were driving your car on a two lane road. A car coming toward you swerved into your lane about 20 yards ahead of you. The car then swerved back into its own lane and drove past you. That’s what actually happened.

You will find that it is very hard at first to describe events exactly, without your judgments and interpretations creeping in. But keep trying to state facts, not opinions, judgments or interpretations. So that’s assignment #2.:: When you feel upset, recognize you are upset, stop, name the feeling you are having, rewind and then try to factually describe what happened. Once you feel you have factually described what happened, then you can go onto the next step.

So you know where we are headed; Assignment #3 will be to see how you judged, interpreted and assumed things that caused you to be upset. As part of getting to a factual description of events you will have to sort through and discard a lot of this, so you won’t be entirely unfamiliar with these elements when we get to the next assignment.

I know this is a little tedious, but the alternative is to be an unstable cork bobbing around on the sea of your emotions. Since we all tend to get a little seasick at times, it’s worth trying to develop your internal anchor…….